Category: COVID through 2022

Not much to say.

Nationally, the rate of daily new cases still appears to befalling, a bit.   Michigan and Minnesota now clearly appear to have peaked.  It doesn’t look like there are any new hotspots arising to take their place.  So it looks like the U.S. fourth wave may have, in fact, peaked.

Whatever the U.K. variant is going to do, it’s pretty much doing it right now.  Per the latest Helix Corporation COVID dashboard data, as of 4/13/2021 more than two-thirds of new U.S. cases were the U.K variant.

The rate of daily vaccinations appears to have slowed, a bit.  In addition, although it is hard to tell from a couple of daily snapshots, the fraction of the elderly who have been vaccinated may finally be topping out.

A few graphs follow. Continue reading Post #1114: COVID-19 update to 4/20/2021.

Is this the peak of the U.S. fourth wave?

Below is the U.S. and regional graph, in logs.  There really hasn’t been a trend to speak of for more than two weeks now.  But now, most of those regional graphs are starting to bend downward.

This past few days, all the places that were hotspots seemed to be getting a break.  The thing that started to look like a peak, for Michigan, a few days back, looks like even more of a peak now.  Minnesota seems to have gotten to a plateau.  All the other places where the U.K. variant is known to be highly prevalent are doing, well, pretty much nothing.  Like so:

Even Colorado, which was the outlier among Mountain states, and the Mountain state with the highest incidence of the U.K. variant, got little break:

The situation isn’t uniformly rosy.  Maine, which had largely been bypassed by COVID-19 in the earlier waves, now has a strong upward trend in new cases per day.  Both Oregon and Washington still have upward trends (but fairly low absolute rates of new cases per day).  Otherwise, you really have to look hard to find any dark clouds on the horizon.

Separately, vaccinations continue apace.  As I noted some time ago, these daily vaccination numbers have some issues.  In particular, they have a strong regular weekly cycle, so if you catch Sunday between your snapshots, it’ll look like the pace of vaccination has slowed.  (Which this next pair of snapshots does.)

I keep hearing news coverage about vaccination rates slowing down, and vaccine “hesitancy” and blah blah blah.  Sure as heck isn’t showing up in the national data.  I wonder of that’s a case of the news media cherry-picking a few places that make a good story.  But overlooking the actual U.S. trend.

Over the past three days, the elderly added another 0.33 percentage points per day, and the U.S. averaged about 3.7M vaccine shots per day.

Today’s data glitch:  I guess it had to happen sometime.  Month after month, states would find old cases and add then dump those into their case counts, generating a “speed bump” in their data.  On 4/17/2021, Missouri found over 7,000 old duplicate cases, and removed them from their case counts, per this documentation, creating, I guess, a “speed dip” in their data?  The problem is that  you can’t plot negative numbers on a log scale.  So I’m tossing those 7500 or so cases back into the Missouri data, and getting on with it.

Not much to say, really.  No material change from prior trends.  US trend is slightly up.  Michigan is almost up to 80 new cases / 100,000 / day, so they’re right where they were at the peak of the U.S. third wave.  The five states with the highest proportion of the U.K. variant are moving in five different directions.  And the elderly continue to get vaccinated, defying all prior survey-based estimates.

U.S. trend remains slightly up.

Michigan has almost reached 80 new cases/ 100,000 per day.  So they’re back into U.S. third wave territory.  But Minnesota isn’t anywhere near its U.S. third wave peak.  And I’ve made the argument that this is cause-and-effect.  Part of Michigan’s problem is that it has a low proportion of the population immune to COVID-19 due to generally low rates of infection in the earlier waves.

The dates are unreadable, but this one spans 10/1/2020 to the present, to show the U.S. third wave.

But it’s not as if all the states with high incidence of the U.K. variant are following Michigan’s path.  Michigan remains an outlier.

 

The elderly continue to get vaccinated.  Last three days, that rate was a bit under 0.4 percentage points per day.  Almost sure to break 80% in the next day or two.  Far more than was suggested by survey data.

 

 

 

Opinions vary on what’s going to happen next in the U.S. fourth wave of COVID-19.  At one end of the spectrum, there’s the CDC director, talking up “impending doom” from the U.S. fourth wave.  And you’ll see sporadic newspaper stories where some expert will opine that a massive U.S. fourth wave of COVID-19 is approaching.  Or might be approaching.  Or at least remains enough of a likelihood that you should keep up your COVID-19 hygiene and get yourself vaccinated.

My post today is a reaction to a news article proclaiming that we’re all going to go the way of Michigan.  With, as far as I can tell, zero hard analysis to back that up.  Certainly, nothing like a statistical analysis of the state-level data (Post #1101), or a detailed outline of the factors that make Michigan particularly vulnerable (Post #1105).

Near as I can tell, that’s straight-up fear-based journalism.  The article more-or-less blames the people of Michigan for being a bunch of COVID-19 hygiene slackers.  When, in fact, that’s just not objectively true.   Or, at least, they’re no worse than 35 or so other states. Continue reading Post #1106: COVID-19 trend to 4/11/2021